“Raising those black boys as if they were family. Talk about Christian sacrifice.”

Julia Scheeres’ memoir is a chronicle of a childhood spent in a Christian-fundamentalist nightmare. And it’s not just HER nightmare; when Julia was very young her parents decided that adopting black children would be the ultimate test of their religious convictions and zeal. Thus came David—and later, when it was decided that David needed a “black playmate,” came Jerome.

Discipline (read: indoctrination) in the Scheeres household was swift and strict, but doubly so for the adopted (read: black) children.

“I don’t get whipped like they do when I talk back or get caught in a lie. I get grounded. I’m spared the rod, and it’s a dirty privilege that makes me feel guilty. I hate sharing genes with the man who hurts them, our father. Our father, who heals the sick and dying by day, and causes injury at night.”

This uneven (read: racist) application of Proverbs 13:24 (spare the rod, spoil the child) served to segregate David and Jerome from the rest of the family. But, in spite of all the obvious inequalities, David and Julia remained close and protective of one another.

As the children grew older they started to chafe under the constraints imposed upon them by their religiously zealous parents. Jerome ran away. Julia and her brother David were ultimately sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic; a dubious and horrific little hellhole called “Escuela Caribe.”

“I still can’t believe that a place like Escuela Caribe exists, and that I find myself enrolled in it. All I did was try to wring some happiness from life, a little fun and a little affection, and as a result I was banished to an island colony ruled by sadistic Jesus freaks.”

Once securely incarcerated at EC, the theological indoctrination was stepped up.

“I swallow dryly. “The Rapture’s due any day now,” he shouts… “The signs of the End Times are here, just like the Book of Revelation prophesized. We’ve got nuclear bombs and legalized abortion and gay homos on prime-time TV. Evil surrounds us.” I don’t recall the Bible mentioning any of those things, but perhaps I wasn’t reading it hard enough.”

And…

“The Pastor leans forward until his face is a few inches from mine, blocking out the rest of the room. His breath smells of boiled cabbage… “I took that little whore, and I stripped her naked and I beat her black and blue,” The Pastor says, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Beat the Devil right out of her. And believe you me, I would not hesitate to do it again.””

Wouldn’t it be great if evangelical philosophy could stand on its own merits? If the brain-washing of children wasn’t essential to its continued existence? Imagine a world where parents encouraged and promoted critical thinking; a world where a mother could simply say, “Your father and I believe the Prophet Muhammad took a trip to heaven on a winged horse” or “Your father and I pray to Ganesha who has four arms and the head of an elephant” or “Your father and I believe a rib-woman ate fruit from a magic tree” and the kids could have all the time they needed to think this through…

…but instead we have places like Escuela Caribe and the Magdalene Asylums and the infamous Canadian “residential schools”—each an example of church sanctioned child abuse.

Excluding the epilogue, Jesus Land isn’t an indictment of faith. It is simply an accounting. It is an honest, often self-deprecating, autobiography—courageously written and, for me, uncomfortably close to home.

“…I can no longer have blind faith in creeds because I am no longer blind.” ~Julia Scheeres, 2005

"The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.” ~Carl Sagan, 1995